We’ve all been there: someone – maybe your ex or your biggest fan – is stalking you on Twitter and populating your timeline with stuff you don’t want to see.

Or worse, if you’ve made a few enemies along the way you can bet they’ll take to Twitter to post crazy stuff about you on an everyday basis. If you only use Twitter’s official app, right now you have two options at your disposal to deal with the situation.

You can either A) unfollow your ex and risk turning him or her into an enemy, or B) block an account that’s been harassing you online. According to a new report, there will soon be a new way to stop receiving updates from accounts: the mute feature.

I know muting is currently available in third-party apps like Tweetbot so the newsworthy part here is that Twitter is finally testing this long overdue feature in its own iPhone and iPad app…

Some users of the company’s iOS and Android clients are now seeing an option to mute accounts that they follow, preventing another user’s tweets and retweets from appearing in their timeline.

The user remains muted until you manually unmute them. In essence, then, the mute feature works as a kind of stealth unfollow — you won’t be seeing another person’s tweets, but they won’t know that.

I’m not sure how it’s possible that third-party apps have the mute feature and Twitter’s own mobile apps do not, but that’s how things currently are.

Speaking of oddities, Tweetdeck – the business-class Twitter client that the micro-blogging startup bought in 2011 – has long supported muting. Hopefully, Twitter is beginning to take its own software a little more seriously.

I want muting in Twitter’s mobile apps done right: let me set the length of time when muting an account and, more importantly, give me the option to mute apps.

Had it not been for Tweetbot’s ability to mute apps (you can even create complex mute filters for keywords and accounts), my timeline would have been swarmed with annoying posts telling me that “this and this person has liked a YouTube video”, “that and that guy has just checked in on Foursquare” and the like.

I really want to use Twitter’s apps but without the aforementioned features their mobile and desktop clients are just useless to me.

Speaking of oddities, Tweetdeck – the business-class Twitter client that the micro-blogging startup bought in 2011 – has long supported muting. Hopefully, Twitter is beginning ti take its own software a little more seriously.
Should be to. Not ti.